For eleven years I taught a class in the first-year seminar program at the University of Texas at Austin called “The Ethics and Politics of Everyday Life.” Here’s how I described the class:

The study of ethics and politics often focuses on big moral moments (such as abortion) or electoral politics and governmental policy (who is going to win, and what kind of laws will they pass). This class considers the importance of the ethics and politics of everyday life in the contemporary United States. The decisions we make about how to live, what to eat, what to buy, how to transport ourselves, which media to watch and read, and which technologies to use have ethical and political dimensions.

During each initial class meeting, starting in 1997, I told the fifteen students that a more accurate name for the course would be “Five Books That Bob Thinks You Should Read.” I was serious about the stated organizing principle for the course—we all should think carefully about our everyday choices—but whatever students got out of the course wouldn’t come mostly from me but from the books, which I selected to engage them intellectually and emotionally. The reading lineup changed over the years, but the first book was always Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, a family story of human suffering and ecological degradation. The last book I taught, in 2007, was Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a hauntingly prescient novel about societal and ecological breakdown.

Looking back, I’m struck by how challenging the books were, not only for students in their first semester of college but for anyone. I hate to sound like an old guy remembering the “good old days,” but former colleagues say that given the ever-shortening attention spans of the digital era, they are now hesitant to assign an entire book, let alone five in one semester with those kinds of themes.

I remember many animated discussions in those classes, but two student comments stick out in my mind.

In the first meeting, I always asked students why they chose the course over the many others available. In the pre-internet period when students registered for courses using an automated phone system, one student explained that he had intended to sign up for a different class but pushed the wrong number and then decided it was too much trouble to go through the many steps to change it. We all laughed, not at him but in solidarity over the cumbersome system and the vagaries of registration. That student turned out to be one of the most thoughtful I ever had in the course, which illustrates a lesson: We might end up in some places in our life by accident, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get something out of the experience.

The other comment came from a student who found some of the philosophical questions we discussed distressing. When he told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay in the class, I gave him a standard speech about the importance of critical thinking. I could see that didn’t mean much to him, and so I asked, “Tell me why you came to this university.” He said he was the first person in his family to go to college and felt a responsibility to get the best job he could after graduation so he could support his parents financially. Anything that got in the way of that made him anxious. “I don’t like to think too much,” he said.

I told him I understood and admired his commitment to his family but asked him to consider whether he could do both: get the training to improve his chances in the job market and also seek out new ideas, even ones that seemed threatening at first. He never spoke to me privately again, and I don’t know how he resolved the tension. But his comment about thinking too much stuck with me.

This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning is a book for people who think too much. By “people” I mean ordinary people, not just philosophers and other professional thinkers, though I hope those folks might pick up this book as well. I was a professor for 26 years, but I have always considered myself to be an ordinary person. I have been told I think too much, which never struck me as a problem, and I enjoy the company of others who think too much. This is a book for people who don’t think there’s such a thing as thinking too much.

For the past decade or two, like almost everyone in the United States, I have been thinking a lot about political polarization. In my 2024 book, It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, I explored how lessons I learned as a journalist and professor could be useful in navigating the culture wars. I analyzed three controversial issues—race and white supremacy, transgenderism and patriarchy, and today’s multiple cascading ecological crises—in a way that I knew wouldn’t settle disagreements but hoped might create common understandings to make disagreements more productive.

As many of my friends said, good luck with that. True, the goal was ambitious and likely achieved with only a few readers, but that only made me want to press forward.

In this book, my goal is not only to continue thinking too much but also to deepen that too-much thinking. I want to suggest ways that people can better understand each other by going deeper—into ourselves and into foundational philosophical questions. I hope to sort out important aspects of my own quirky identity by focusing on a childhood that I have trouble remembering, and then ask how those experiences might influence my approach to the search for meaning in our lives, explored through four questions:

• Is there a God or gods?
• Even if there is not, is there some spiritual plane of human existence beyond the physical?
• Even if not, can we trust in Nature (with a capital N) to provide meaning?
• Even without those sources of meaning, do we at least have free will within the physical world?

Most people answer yes to at least one of those questions. My answer to all four is no. My central claim is that we can reject all those beliefs, let go of the search for transcendent meaning, and still live a fulfilling life. More accurately: I want to try to understand why I have rejected all those beliefs, abandoned the search for transcendent meaning, and yet live a life that has been fulfilling for me. This book was written not to resolve age-old philosophical debates but to help me understand what I believe, and don’t believe, and by extension perhaps contribute to readers’ quest to understand themselves.

If your answer to any or all of those four questions is yes, I am not trying to argue you out of those answers, in part because these aren’t the sort of questions that have obviously right or wrong answers. I am not arguing that the way I understand the world is the only productive way to think about the world. I’m describing the ways that I feel and think. I am not asserting that I know the answers to those four questions, nor do I think anyone else knows in any definitive sense. That’s another thing you might disagree with me about; lots of people believe they have definitive answers. But my goal is not to change your mind about that, either. Instead, I’m writing to try to explain my own mind to myself, with the hope that it might also prove interesting to others.

My conclusion is that we can live fulfilling lives without looking for meaning that is generated beyond the everyday, ordinary, physical plane of existence. Or, again to be more accurate: I live a fulfilling life without believing in God, without any sense of spirituality, without looking to capital-N Nature for meaning, and without assuming I have free will. We can be the crassest materialists—not clamoring for more stuff, but materialist in the sense of believing there is no level beyond the physical on which to search for meaning—and live fulfilling lives. Again, to be most accurate, I am a crass materialist, a term I will use as interchangeable with physicalist, and I live what seems to me a fulfilling life. Why I feel this way and think these things has increasingly intrigued me as I’ve grown older. Now that I’m officially old—in the United States, that’s marked by receiving Social Security and Medicare—I am indulging myself by writing not about the pressing social and political issues of the day but about questions that keep coming around on the guitar.

For some years now, one question I often find myself turning over in my mind is about Carl Jung’s famous statement, “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” Maybe most people cannot stand that possibility, but I seem to be able to without much fuss. My book is an exploration of why that might be.

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Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, published by Blue Ear Books in 2026. Jensen is also the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024). More information at https://robertwjensen.org/ or email [email protected].

This essay is adapted from This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning.